April 29, 2017

TOSHIBA Satellite L510 laptop battery

It’s a pity you haven’t upgraded before now. It’s a big jump from 2001-vintage Windows XP to today’s Windows 8.1, and you would probably have had fewer problems adapting to Microsoft Windows 7. This is still the business standard -- in fact, Windows 7 Pro is still a current Microsoft product -- so I imagined there would be Windows 7 laptops floating around at discount prices. Apparently not. There are plenty of new models from business suppliers such as Dell and HP, but they are not cheaper than consumer-oriented Windows 8 laptops (though I’d expect them to be better made).You could buy a refurbished Windows 7 laptop from an established supplier such as Morgan Computers or tier1online.com (recommended in a comment by a reader), or possibly on eBay. Refurbished/Grade A1 laptops usually come with a 6-month guarantee. It would be best to stick to top-tier brands, such as Lenovo/IBM ThinkPad, Toshiba Portégé and HP EliteBook and ProBook laptops. These will do the job, and you will get a much better keyboard. But again, you won’t save much money, and you need to know a lot about laptops to spot the best deals. There’s a lot of old rubbish around as well.Under the circumstances, you will probably decide on a new Windows 8 laptop. If so, try to get Windows 8.1 pre-installed, as the latest version has been updated to make life easier for users who don’t have touch screens. In addition, install Stardock’s cheap Start8 utility.If you have the original discs or at least the Product Key, you can run your old copy of Microsoft Office 2003 under Windows 8. The drawback is that it’s no longer supported and therefore a security risk.

Alternatively, your husband may be using a copy of Office that allows two installations: one on a desktop and one on a laptop. In this case, the drawback is that it’s intended to make Office more useful to one user, not two: you shouldn’t use both at the same time.Any more recent version of Office Home and Student would be OK, which gives you a choice of 2007, 2010, and 2013. Microsoft supports products for at least 10 years, so 2013 should be good until 2023. Unfortunately, this is not available on DVD, but at least Microsoft lets you move the Keycard version to a new PC. For more info, see my answer from last year: Microsoft Office: which version should I buy?In theory, you could use the free online version of Microsoft Word in OneDrive, but it would struggle to handle a novel. You’d be much better off with a word processor running on your PC. If you can’t afford Microsoft Office 2013 Home and Student Edition (£89.99) now, you may be able to use a free alternative until you can. The obvious ones are AbiWord and LibreOffice Writer. Both still have user interfaces derived from antique versions of Microsoft Word, so you should find them more familiar than Office 2013.Try one to see how it handles copies of your novel files: how much does the layout change? Have you lost any features you need, such as track changes or draft/outline?

Can you easily zoom in to make text easier to read? These programs may not be worth the effort if you really need Office’s functions and compatibility with complex Word documents (multiple columns, custom headlines, embedded images and videos, footnotes etc), but they should be fine for ordinary texts. If you save files in RTF (Rich Text Format) rather than .doc/.docx then you shouldn’t have any major problems. (AbiWord’s .doc files are actually RTF files, not binary .doc files.)The publishing industry has standardised on Microsoft Word, but it’s very easy to load an .rtf document into Word and save it as .docx if your novel is accepted.Microsoft is moving from boxed software to a new business model of downloaded and streamed software, paid for on subscription and continuously updated via the cloud, ie Office 365. I don’t expect boxed copies -- or free copies of Office on PCs -- to be around for much longer, except for old stock.One of the striking features of the economic recovery in the UK and elsewhere is how sluggish capital spending has been – especially considering that businesses can borrow at rock-bottom interest rates.Why is that? Well, if you are reading this on your laptop, and you use that same laptop for work, you may guess where this is going.

Paul Donovan notes that even where capital spending has risen during the recovery, in the UK, for instance, it is still cyclically abnormal given the low cost of borrowing - in the years leading up to 2007 borrowing rates were much higher. Photograph: UBS, Haver
Paul Donovan, economist at the investment bank UBS in London, thinks he may have found an explanation in the changing way we work.The lacklustre growth in capital spending is peculiar, Donovan notes, because it has been accompanied by a significant increase in the number of businesses in many economies, including in the UK. So why haven’t we seen some start-up capital spending?"In 2000, 32% of UK businesses were employers. By 2014, 24% of UK businesses were employers. This raises the obvious question of what on Earth 76% of UK businesses were doing if they were not employing anyone – and the answer of course is that they were single person businesses where the owner was the sole person ‘on payroll’.

The sluggish capital spending story is peculiar because it has been accompanied by a significant rise in the number of businesses in many economies, including the UK, says Donovan. Photograph: UBS
This matters for capital spending, because people setting up as self-employed - for example, as a consultant – may well make little or no upfront investment in kit. Says Donovan:If you are a self-employed consultant, you probably already have a laptop, have a car, have an office at home. As the boundaries between home and work blur, we are making better use of the capital we have got.”
Self-employment now accounts for 15% of the workforce in the UK. Across Europe (using slightly different statistics) self-employment has risen in several key economies, although not Germany, says Donovan at UBS. Photograph: Eurostat via Haver, UBS

Alongside (and tied up with) changes to working practices are technological changes. Again, this influences capital spending, or "capex” – this time in terms of who is doing the spending. Says Donovan:Twenty years ago, capital spending on computer equipment meant a desktop computer at least. These were not portable devices. Business investment in technology meant investment that was clearly capital spending; purchased by the company and physically located in the company. Today that is not true. A laptop or a tablet device can easily provide the basic requirements for an employee.”He notes that consumer spending on technology has increased relative to business investment on technology in the US, the UK and many European economies. In other words, as spending on technology has waned in the corporate sector it has continued to grow in the consumer sector.Donovan (writing on a laptop that he paid for, not UBS) concludes that we may well be missing a secret capital spending story.It was an unusual burglary, in which four or five laptops were stolen from a Scottish renewable energy manufacturer in the dead of a March night in 2011. So innovative was the company that it had been been visited by a 60-strong delegation led by China’s then vice-premier only two months before.Nothing else was taken from the company and the crime, while irritating, went unsolved and forgotten – until a few years later pictures began emerging that showed a remarkably similar project manufactured in the world’s most populous country.Then some people who were involved in the Scottish company, Pelamis Wave Power, started making a connection between the break-in and the politician’s visit, which was rounded off with dinner and whisky tasting at Edinburgh Castle hosted by the then Scottish secretary, Michael Moore.Max Carcas, who was business development director at Pelamis until 2012, said the similarities between the Scottish and Chinese products were striking. Speaking publicly for the first time, he said: "Some of the details may be different but they are clearly testing a Pelamis concept.”

It might be that China’s engineers had been working along roughly the same lines as the UK engineers. Or it may be that China attempted to replicate the design based on pictures of the Pelamis project freely available on the web.Or there could be a darker explanation: that Pelamis was targeted by China, which has been repeatedly accused of pursuing an aggressive industrial espionage strategy. The answer matters, given security concerns raised by the government’s award of the Hinkley Point nuclear contract to China."It was a tremendous feather in our cap to be the only place in the UK outside of London that the Chinese vice-premier visited,” Carcas said. "We did have a break-in about 10 weeks after, when a number of laptops were stolen. It was curious that whoever broke in went straight to our office on the second floor rather than the other company on the first floor or the ground floor.”Carcas, who is now managing director of the renewable energy consultancy Caelulum, added: "I could infer all sorts of things but I do not want to say.” The new wave-power machine, the Vagr Atferd, built by Leith-based Pelamis for energy firm E.ON, in a photograph first presented in 2010.

Ironically, Pelamis is now defunct but the Chinese product, Hailong (Dragon) 1, still appears to be under development.Scotland has been at the forefront of the development of wave technology for decades. Pelamis was one of the cutting-edge companies, originally named the Ocean Power Delivery company when founded in 1998 and renamed Pelamis Wave Power in 2007.The company, which employed a staff of 50, developed a giant energy wave machine, which it named Pelamis. It looked like a metal snake, facing directly into the waves, harnessing the power of the sea. It had a unique hinged joint system that helped regulate energy flow as waves ran down its length.Other revolutionary features included a sophisticated control system and a quick mechanism for releasing it into the sea and recovering it. In 2004, it became the first wave-energy machine to generate electricity into the grid.China expressed interest in December 2010 in an email to Pelamis: "It is decided that His Excellency, Mr Li Keqiang, vice-premier of the state council of China, and the delegation (60 people) headed by him will pay a visit to the Pelamis Sea Energy Converter between 16.40 and 17.00 on Sunday 9 January.” China’s Vice Premier Li Keqiang (C) is escorted on a tour of the Pelamis Wave Power factory on January 9, 2011 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

  1. http://dovendosi.blogpage.eu/
  2. http://dovendosi.cafeblog.hu/
  3. http://en.donkr.com/blog/dovendosi

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